sales tax more than double my local rate?!?

The state sales tax rate in Illinois is 6.250%. With local taxes, the total sales tax rate is between 6.250% and 11.000%.

http://www.sale-tax.com/Illinois

From the page above you can find your city to see what the sales tax is.

Hey there tax is charged at the local rate and is governed by the local sales tax in Argentina atm it is 21% of total purchase so if you spend $ 29.85 the vat would be

6.16$ so the amount would be 36$ roughly

Hope this helps when buying things you should always check the vat value added tax or sales tax

For those not in the USA, we don't have a national sales taxes, or Vat. We do have state, county, city/local taxes which are add at the point of sale. So in my home town sales tax is 10% total. So the new box wll be $550. Also I don't know who Microsoft
figures the exchange rate.

I wondered about VAT and what the price was in US dollars (I looked for the UK - 20%, Germany - 19% and Australia - 10%).

In US terms (tax not included), the prices (in US dollars) were. As far as i'm concerned VAT should not be considered in price differences (as it is a difference in taxes). So, it is really not that much more expensive in US terms (especially if you consider
the dollar exchange rate is much weaker than it used to be)...

UK: $536.15

DE: $531.18 (Germany if you didn't know, using it as a representative of EU)

AU: $493.00 (Australia)

Now for the tax question - it varies, however the VAT is bigger than any US sales tax I know of (except Australia). Converting it into dollars after tax (I'll use my local sales tax of 9.5%)

* US: $547.49 (my sales tax rate)

* UK: $670.18

* DE: $655.78

* AU: $547.78

With taxes not included and a game included, I figured the difference/value in price is...

UK: ($23.94)

DE: ($28.81)

AU: ($66.99)

That means in US terms all of the countries are getting a better deal/value than they are in the US. With the current exchange rates and volumes at launch, the numbers probably should be favoring the US in price - but it is only like a $25 difference. The
governments in Europe take a big chunk of change. If you were wondering, the equivalent tax (in $) is:

* US: $47.50 (my 9.5% rate, I actually paid an effective 1% due to store credit)

* UK: $134.04 (86 GBP)

* DE: $124.60 (95 Euros)

* AU: $54.78 (AU dollars)

That is absolutely not true at all. There are more taxes in New York and California than there are in Alberta, Canada (5% sales tax), and tax is applied after the purchase.

Furthermore, this would imply that Microsoft has some sort of special tax situation that Steam for example does not. I own hundreds of Steam games, and I buy them in CAD at nothing more than the cost adjusted for the USD exchange rate.

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